i could not be trusted to make this game because my immediate thought is that the game advertises and markets itself as what op intended but steadily and then rapidly becomes very clear that instead of a cozy cute cottagecore “mystery” the story SHOULD be about the blatant corruption, cruelty, systemic oppression, and persecution and bigotry of her neighbors, but the main character is desperately clinging to the original genre of omg cozy cute and cottagecore because she feels overwhelmed by the potential responsibility to enact meaningful change rather than feel-good aesthetic positivity, thus becoming actively complicit in the town’s crimes through her not mere inaction but in fact conscious choice to decide that she will be the protagonist of a cozy cute genre game rather than a story which might challenge her preconceptions of the world and the state of her own community.
youre all so fucking bad at understanding my vision its actually making me want to make this dumb fucking game. god. theres no weird glitchy spooky fx where everything is dirty and rundown theres no “the cat is secretly a trafficked child!” theres no peeling back the curtain theres no possibility of the player being able to “do the right thing and get the good ending” or whatever. its a regular ass town with regular ass banal evils and regular ass animals that eat cats left outside and regular ass awful people in the community. it is a town like any other town.
without the simple answer of a demon prince of nightmares or an evil cult or an outright blatant bigotry the witch has no way to solve these problems in a clearly defined and purposeful way. worse, anything she does is unglamorous and does not fit into her idea of her life and the community she feels she belongs in. she is aware that things might be better in some meaningful way but cannot conceptualize how to do this without threatening her cherished personal ideology and material comforts and thus enacts her agency in ways which only further the problems, but never in a way that directly challenges her or her lifestyle or views, and so she’s fine with it.
the entire point would be to force the player to question whether they are any different from the witch. whether they are building a praxis that can matter or if they are instead, like the witch, complicit in the systems letting them be complicit. ugh.
whether they can keep playing the game because they slowly realize that the witch isn’t going to change things because she’s cozy cute and it’s overwhelming and difficult and so she doesn’t, and you’re playing the game thinking “but there must be a simple solution to getting the Good Ending, right?” but there isn’t and eventually you have to examine yourself diving into a cozy idyllic world and pull yourself out of it into your own everyday life and see the everyday evils around you and decide if you’re going to do the same
So one of my neighbors has a lawn Roomba or whatever they’re called, and this thing trundles around looking like a background robot in the background of the original trilogy, and ABSOLUTELY BAFFLING THE DOGS.
They have concluded, I think, that it’s some kind of prey animal because right after this video ended they decided to crouch down and stalk it, which means I’m 90% sure I’m going to have to stop Arwen from eating it at some point.
Of course it’s a prey animal it fucking eats GRASS
While I can’t fault your reasoning on robot taxonomy, apparently we’re both wrong: Arwen, as much as she is a high-prey-drive animal, is foremost, a herding dog, and has decided that the Lawn Roomba is a SHEEP.
What happened is the lawn roomba belongs to the guy that does most of the maintainence on the neighborhood park, and he had it out grazing on a different section of lawn when my parents came down for a walk and Arwen was siezed by 200 years worth fo Kelpie Instincts, rolled out of her Harness and proceded to herd the shit out of this tiny, oblivious robot.
Everything was on display- mock-stalking, intimidating eye contact, barking, running in front of it to try to get it to balk, the scariest barking she can muster (which is actually. pretty scary if you’re not used to Loud Dogs), looking back at my parents for directions. or rather, looking at my Mom while Dad tried unsuccessuflly to capture her.
After about ten minutes they realized she wasn’t biting it, and decided to let her play Sheep Simulator 5000 for a while. She eventually figured out that
It doesn’t respond to Yelling, Posturing or Aggressive Eye Contact
It does respond to having it’s wheels or bump hazards hit
It would respond to its side being nosed or slapped by moving in a different direction
Conent that this was apparently some kind of blind, deaf and particularly stupid sheep, she could now manage the robot by smacking it if it got too close to the creek bed or fence for her liking, and was eventually content to sit on the highest point of the field and Supervise ™ it.
“Hey.” Said Roger, owner of the robot. “Do you think if I put the ramp down she’ll herd it into the back of my pickup?”
Arwen was mostly asleep in the afternoon sun as roger put the ramp down but woke right up when mom Whistled, then pointed at the truck. She immediately went after the robot and did something that wouldn’t have occured to me, an allegedly more intelligent being: the robot is roughly triangular, and when it hits an obstacle, will change direction so that one of its other sides (rather than points) is now the ‘front’. So to get it to move in a straight line in the direction she wanted, Arwen would smack the two sides of the robot that she didn’t want it to go in in quick sucession, and got it across the field, over a small hill and up the ramp as fast as it’s clumsy little wheels could go.
“I didn’t know you had a fully-trained sheepdog!” Said Roger
“Me either.” said Mom.
So Arwen now has a Semi-Weekly Appointment to play with Sheepbot.
I just saw a completely different one of your posts that happened to mention Arwen and my brain went “could it be the Arwen with the lawn roomba friend?!” and then spent 10 minutes finding this.
I had only seen screenshots and have literally retold this story to friends bc it’s just so wholesome, so this is a very fun moment for me lol
